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Museums Refine the Art of Listening

ON THE FLOOR Naum Gabos "Linear Construction in Space, No. 4," a plastic and stainless steel sculpture, draws visitors in a conventional gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

IF it seems someone is watching every time you go to a museum, you’re not far off.

When the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded $450 million home on West 53rd Street three years ago, the ticket desk began compiling the ZIP code or country of origin of every visitor, putting the information in a database.

At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which is gearing up for the opening of its $345 million expansion in 2010, researchers found that besides marquee names like Picasso, van Gogh and Monet, subjects like interior design, royal jewels and Egyptian mummies pull in the crowds. And at the Detroit Institute of Arts, officials recently discovered that the average visitor spends only four or five minutes in any gallery, rather than the 20 minutes the officials had expected. Only 7 percent bothered to read the wall plaques.

While museum market research has been around for two decades, gathering data about visitors has never been as important, or as sophisticated, as it is now. As museums expand, they need more paying customers to cover ever-increasing costs. And they’re competing for those customers with local shopping malls, movie theaters, even grocery stores.

“I call it the water-park phenomenon,” said Ford Bell, president and chief executive of the American Association of Museums in Washington. “A zillion other things are competing for our leisure time. People might visit a museum to see a Monet or a toaster or a textile display — what’s important is it’s getting them in the door.”

Now, besides the reliable techniques — focus groups, exit surveys and mail-in questionnaires — museums are exploring new ways to learn what visitors want. In Detroit, which spent $158 million on a renovation and gallery reinstallation project completed last fall, researchers visited local mothers in their homes to determine how to attract more families to the museum.

More common, however, is the use of software to help museums get a more accurate picture of who their visitors are.

“Now you can do 10 different surveys at the same time,” said Karin Graftstrom, market research manager in the visitor services department of the Metropolitan Museum. “You could never do that before.” Visitor research has had an impact on everything from museum hours and the brevity of wall labels to the music played during evening hours. At some museums, it has influenced the mix of exhibitions.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry, the director, said that it was just as important to know who is not coming to the museum as it is to know who is.

“It’s what you’re missing,” he said. While entry information and other data showed that a healthy number of college students visited the Modern, “we were not drawing as many of the 20- to 30-years-olds that we hoped,” Mr. Lowry said. “So we went out to determine how to better communicate with them.”

This age group was visiting the Modern’s affiliate, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, but didn’t seem interested in the Manhattan museum. So two years ago the Modern started the “Pop Rally,” with screenings, gallery tours, collaborations with artists and concerts, including performances by Patti Smith, Chicks on Speed and Paper Rad. The museum asked its younger staff members to organize the programs.

The museum also began posting messages about “Pop Rally” and its exhibitions on the museum Web site, as well as sending e-mail and text messages. “A lot of this is a generational challenge,” said Mr. Lowry. “It’s communicating in ways that people are comfortable.”

The “Pop Rally” events have attracted 500 to 1,000 attendees, the majority from just the age group the museum had targeted. Eventually, the museum wants to find out if some of these visitors also come to see exhibitions at other times, too.

Mr. Lowry said research was helping the museum make more informed decisions about issues like opening hours, but doesn’t influence the actual kinds of exhibitions it presents.

When the Modern realized, by looking at country-of-origin data, that the number of Korean and Chinese visitors had increased significantly, it added Korean and Chinese to the six languages its brochures and guides were printed in. Officials also started offering guided tours in more languages. And by tracking the time at which visitors arrived, museum officials realized that during the holidays the ticket booths were getting especially crowded, so opening time was advanced an hour to 9:30 a.m.

By questioning visitors in its lobby as well as through the mail, the museum discovered that people don’t circulate in the ways curators would expect.

“People graze,” said Wendy Woon, deputy director for education at the Modern. “Some read labels, others don’t,” adding, “We want to give people the keys, not turn the lock. People want choice.”

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So besides the traditional audio guides the museum has been offering ways of getting information on hand-held devices and cellphones. With some exhibitions, the museum set up small rooms with catalogs and other educational materials.

While serving up what audiences want may be a smart business move, there is a fear by curators that things can go too far, that catering to public opinion could dumb down a museum and supplant curatorial wisdom. Are museums for high culture or low? Places to see Ralph Lauren’s car collection and “Star Wars” costumes, props and drawings rather than Vermeer and Renaissance tapestries?

Most institutions stress that the findings from their research have no bearing on plans for exhibitions — that the two are kept apart, a separation of church and state. “It’s all about how we present it, not what we show or don’t show,” said Nancy Price, director of marketing and communications at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

But at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, research does influence the mix of exhibitions presented each year. John S. Stanley, deputy director of programs and services, said the museum conducted on-site written surveys where it presents 50 ideas and lets the public comment on them. “If something scores low, for instance, we will then pair it with a show that tests high so they balance each other out,” he said.

A year and a half ago, the museum hired the marketing firm J.D. Power & Associates to try to understand what visitors want. “We found out that the No. 1 thing that gets people to the museum is our collection,” Mr. Stanley said.

The research also found that visitors had many different ideas about the best way to learn about the collection, so the museum began testing different presentation elements. “We recently put a touch screen in a Mayan exhibition to see how the public interacts with it,” Mr. Stanley said. The screens were positively received.

And because museum-goers said they liked choices other than audio guides or formal tours, Boston officials initiated “spotlight talks,” informal discussions with instructors in galleries. The museum recently tested different types of seating in the galleries, some that can be moved, some that cannot. “These might be seemingly mundane,” Mr. Stanley said. “But they are ways of getting a satisfied visitor.”

In Detroit, museum staff conducted “timing and tracking” surveys, where researchers watched to see how much time visitors spent in the galleries and how they looked at art. “That was a real wake-up call that we needed to do things differently,” said Matt Sikora, associate educator for evaluation at the museum. “The studies showed people were overwhelmed.”

So in its new galleries, the museum hung fewer works of art. Wall labels were cut to 150 words from 250. The museum even sought opinions about a video for its 18th century galleries. The video showed a period dinner, replete with Meissen porcelain and 18th century silver. A stylist created a period feast, right down to a roast pig centerpiece.

“It was meant to show the opulence of the dinner,” Mr. Sikora said. “The problem was the video was too long to engage its audience.” So it was cut to five minutes, from eight. “And the pig generated so many questions and was so distracting we left it out,” he said.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, officials have been conducting exit surveys three or four times a year for a decade. More recently, they added focus groups and online surveys. In addition to the usual intelligence, officials found that “people want to know that what they’re seeing is relevant to their life,” said Ms. Price. “This might sound simple, but it’s important for us to hear.” And something they keep in mind when programming lectures; the museum prefers to invite speakers who are well-known in the community.

When they know that an exhibition might be particularly challenging, museum officials introduce “learning lounges, rooms next to the galleries with catalogs and excerpts of artists talking,” she said. “And when we had the Matthew Barney show we presented a variety of different ways to access the audio guide, through iPods and cellphones as well as traditional audio guides, tools that were especially familiar to its under-35 audience.”

Research also showed officials in San Francisco that one of the best ways to reach audiences is by placing banners around the city. “We hear it from tourists and we hear it from folks in town, members and nonmembers,” Ms. Price said.

Now, as the museum prepares for a Frida Kahlo retrospective in June, it is trying to figure out how to best serve what it anticipates will be an unusually large number of visitors. It will stay open until 10 p.m. on Thursday nights, rather than the usual 8:45 p.m. And curators are grappling with how best to install the show. Do they mount the paintings higher so they will be visible from a distance? And what about the wall labels? How long should they be and where will it be the easiest to see them?

In the end, Ms. Price said, the answers to those and other questions come from research — “studying ways our visitors can best access art and information.”

Correction: March 14, 2008

An article in the special Museums section on Tuesday about efforts to learn what museum visitors want described the status of a renovation and gallery reconstruction project at the Detroit Institute of Arts incorrectly. The $158 million project opened last fall; it is not still under construction.